Sometimes when I'm on a photo shoot, I change my camera focus
to close-up, which puts me just inches, say, from the inside of a flower. I
can spend much time in-tight like that, marveling at the complexities of a
leaf, pistil, stamen, occasionally even a bumblebee inside stuffing its
pollen sacs.

Sometimes when reading the news, I find myself caught up in the close-up
mode: deep into the details, the news-of-the-day stories, the gossip, the
momentary winners and the losers, the minutiae of daily political life.

In both instances, while one learns much in the close-up mode, it's also
important to pull back, to see not just the trees and flowers, but the
forest and the contextual landscape. To see what it is we citizens are
really talking about, and fighting about -- the deeper content. Pundits and
politicians are more comfortable in close-up mode. The large issues are much
more difficult, complex, even scary to deal with.

But it's those grand issues that will determine our future, America's
future, the planet's future. Who's up and who's down in the polls are, in
that sense, distractions from the more meaningful realities.

That's what I find so discouraging these days. This country, humanity, the
globe are rushing pell-mell to disaster, mostly by neglecting what needs to
be done while we're diddling with the political minutiae. This tendency to
avoid the obvious larger questions reminds one of the thrust of Albert
Einstein's famous quote: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed
everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled
catastrophe."

Consider the following seven areas of concern. No doubt, you could add many
more to the list.

FIXING A BROKEN SYSTEM

1. Every so often, unfettered capitalism nearly collapses into itself.
President FDR realized that truth in the Great Depression and saved the
capitalist system by introducing major reforms into the mix. Now 70-plus
years later, after the unbridled capitalism of the Reagan/CheneyBush era,
where greed and rapaciousness were encouraged to run amok, it's clear that
once again the system requires major reforms to save it. Obama, who put into
power noted de-regulators who helped lead the economy into near-collapse
(Summers, Geithner, Bernanke, et al.), doesn't appear to have the will or
desire to fight this battle other than with rhetoric. And thus the economy
continues to "drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." Americans' anger
directed at corporatist greed and abuse of power, and at the politicians who
benefit from that system but do precious little to help the hurting
middle-class and the poor, is diluting the power of the American Dream. As
we slide further into a Second Great Depression this year and next, that
anger is going to spill out in more and more ugly, and likely more violent,
ways.

The U.S., which should be leading the world in innovation and marketing in
fields such as non-fossil-fuel energy, stem-cell research and other
scientific advances, is lagging way behind and may not be able to catch up.
China and India and Brazil, among others, benefit big time, as the U.S.
slips further down the list of vibrant, economically secure and growing
societies. Part of the reason America can't move quickly in these areas is
that a third of the country is caught up in fundamentalist-derived fear and
suspicion of science, egged on by political conservatives, who benefit by
this Know-Nothing foundation of their base voters.

Why is this system continuing as-is? At least one major reason is that the
short-term (often quarterly) bottom-line rules. Profit is all and it must be
immediate so that shareholders continue to buy into the corporation and the
capitalist system. There is no room for consideration of long-range
consequences of short-term actions. And there is precious little concern for
something known in most Western societies as "the public good."

Usually, the often-xenophobic and racist elite philosophy behind this
selfish attitude is disguised and hidden. But every so often, we get to see
what really is going on. Just the other day, the Republican candidate for
governor in South Carolina, Lieutenant-GovernorAndre Bauer,
explained why he didn't want the state providing benefits to those less
fortunate, such as free or reduced-price meals in school cafeterias:

"My grandmother was not a highly
educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray
animals. You know why? Because they breed," Bauer said, according to the
Greenville News. "You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal
or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that
don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is
you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any
better." (For the full audiotape,
follow this link.)

This philosophy of justified selfishness
and racism helps explain why the many thousands of poor, mostly black
Americans were ignored and left to their own devices post-Katrina in New
Orleans under the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush. At least1300 citizens died from such
neglect.

IMPERIALISM IS SO 20th CENTURY

2. Imperialism no longer works. Nationalist and religious guerrilla forces
can force high-tech imperialist armies into prolonged and massively
expensive stalemates. Since the U.S. can't move fast enough in developing
energy alternatives, it remains locked into the battle around the globe in
other countries for the remaining traditional fuels: coal, oil, gas. Even
the negative environmental ramifications of bio-mass energy haven't been
thought through. This way of operating is a self-destructive loop, one that
winds up involving the U.S. in senseless, outrageously expensive wars around
the globe, associated with obtaining and protecting natural resources, where
all the high-tech hardware is no real match for native anger and
determination (read: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somali, Yemen, Pakistan,
etc.) But President Obama continues on with many of the same reckless
imperialist policies as his predecessors. And "thus we drift toward
unparalleled catastrophe."

GETTING ALL HOT & BOTHERED

3. While the world fiddles, the planet burns. The developing world, anxious
to achieve first-world superpower status, repeats the worst aspects of
industrialization, which pollution helps to more quickly heat up the planet.
Perhaps the best worst example: millions of newly better-off Chinese are
buying cars and, like many in the U.S., China's rulers refuse to deal with
the reality and ramifications of global warming and climate-change.
Conferences after world conferences are held to deal with these topics and
sometimes they even issue high-sounding goals (as in the recent Copenhagen
confab), but nothing really happens. The fundamentalists and the Hard
Rightists are overjoyed at the lack of action on global warming, a reality
they continue to deny. And we can't even get cap-and-trade, which really is
little more than the selling and trading of pollution permits, a license fee
(passed on to consumers) for destroying the planet. And thus we drift toward
unparalleled catastrophe.

THE BIG FLUSH

4. The economy is in the toilet, even though establishment economists keep
telling us how we're just about to turn the corner. Try telling that to the
15-20 million workers who have lost their jobs these past two years and
can't find others. And we're not even at the bottom of this
recession/depression yet, as the next wave of mortgage foreclosures (in
private residences and commercial property) and owner-walkaways are
cresting. And the ripple effects from such widespread joblessness and
homelessness have devastating long-term consequences socially, culturally,
economically as federal, state and local taxes revenues continue to decline,
and in terms of rising crime rates. The infrastructure in cities and towns
can't be properly maintained and improved since there's no money to fix
roads, bridges, schools, etc.

So what does Obama do?: He plays politics with deficit-fears at a time when
the economy needs more stimulus, not less, certainly not a spending freeze
on everything except "national security" and the military.

But, what am I saying? Of course, there's always a spare trillion lying
around to pay for another extension of another war. And thus we drift toward
unparalleled catastrophe.

MILITARY STALEMATES

5. Military experts have told the President and the public that the two wars
America is fighting right now cannot be won. The most one can hope for is a
stalemate while U.S. forces try to build up local armies to battle
anti-Western extremists. President Obama himself, for example, has said
there is little chance of victory in Afghanistan (a lesson already learned
by the Brits and Russians, who were forced to withdraw over the past century
and more), but he's sending more American young men and women to fight and
die there anyway, in order to withdraw them later on a U.S. timetable. The
presence of U.S. forces in massive numbers, and the use of drone missile
attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with their inevitable "collateral
damage" of innocent civilians, probably does more to prolong the wars and
aids in the recruitment by extremists of more anti-Western volunteers and
suicide bombers. But Obama will not turn back from this "hard imperialism"
momentum. And thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

CHANGE POLICIES -- WHY?

6. Because his favorable numbers are slipping, and he got his Massachusetts
wake-up call, Obama is re-constituting his old campaign staff to prepare for
the mid-term elections in November. He proclaimed his policies and
priorities, all good ones, during the 2008 campaign, but hardly fought for
most of them. It's mostly public relations and spin-doctoring now. It would
seem to make sense to examine, and perhaps alter, the Administration's
ongoing policies -- but instead, we will hear new campaign buzzwords,
slogans and marching orders for the upcoming election cycle. Of course,
Obama could take another course: He could just get in there with the wide
range of campaign promises he ran on in 2008, and fight like hell to get
them implemented. But that would require a willingness to slug it out with
his political enemies, and Obama seems content to try to work with those who
wish him no good.

Which translates to: Nothing will really get done. Partisan sniping and
mud-throwing have become the new permanent political norms. And now with the
Republicans in possession of 41 votes in the Senate, much of the more
progressive agenda is endangered, as the GOP can just filibuster any and all
bills, if it so chooses. And the Democrats, per usual, will roll over on
their backs in a submissive posture. No wonder Congress ranks so low in the
estimation of the electorate -- Republicans more than Democrats, but them,
too.

"THAT's why the base is sitting
things out. They don't need blogs or MSNBC to tell them that Democrats
can't govern. They already knew that Republicans don't WANT to govern,
but the Democrats were supposed to be different. And they are, they WANT
to govern, but they can't. And the voters that worked their asses off to
give Democrats the White House and super majorities in Congress are now
realizing that it was all for nothing. That all that talk about hope and
change was cynical bullshit designed to motivate them. It worked once,
but that crowd is learning the art of political cynicism, and it ain't
pretty."

In our electoral system, every action is
calculated by the politicians not for the public good but for how it will
affect their re-election chances. And thus we drift toward unparalled
catastrophe.

THE CORPORATE LOCK

7. Corporations, which already control most of the institutions that affect
our lives -- including making sure there will be no truly effective national
health-care reforms -- now have been given carte blanche by the U.S. Supreme
Court to spend us much as they wish, however they wish, to influence more
aspects of American life, specifically the electoral process. They can, for
example, openly move to buy politicians now, as they have been given the
same status as actual persons. One perhaps unforeseen consequences of this
new activist-court opinion is that foreigners and multinational
corporations, and even other governments through corporations, can buy their
way directly into influencing American elections. If China or France, or
even al-Qaida, doesn't like certain U.S. policies, they can just pour
billions into corporations designated to electing friendly politicians in
the U.S. Congress.

The Pandora's box has been opened through this unwise court decision, and we
all are going to pay a penalty for years to come -- at least until the
composition of the Supreme Court changes with fewer conservative ideologues
on the bench.

One possible partial solution would be for public financing of all federal
elections, but it's difficult to imagine incumbents, who now will have all
the corporate funds coming their way, turning down those huge amounts of
money for the relatively paltry sums offered by public financing. But the
U.S. citizenry still should push for this solution as the most logical way
around this corrupt system of buying influence and votes.

Without some major electoral-financing reform, elections will mean little,
if anything. And thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

As I say, I'm just listing seven off-the-top-of-my-head Larger Issues here
that go beyond the daily political minutiae. I'll be interested to see what
you come up with on your own list.